Jan 15
10
THREE THINGS REGARDING GOD’S GRACE
1. Grace is always sovereign. “Therefore, hath He mercy on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will He hardeneth.” (Romans 9:18)
2. God’s grace is always free. “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:24)
3. God’s grace is always saving. “By grace are ye saved.” (Eph. 2:8)
God’s grace is not an offer up for man’s acceptance or rejection. His grace sovereignly, freely saves! We cannot believe grace without believing these three things regarding grace. Todd Nibert.
In all spiritual things all your temptations, all your darkness, all your wanderings God will overrule. It shall be well with you. There shall never be a night, but that morning shall come; there shall never be a day of trouble, but a day of prosperity shall follow; there shall never be an emptying, but there shall be a filling; there shall never be a bringing down, but that He will raise you up again. Let it be either darkness or light, sorrow or grief, night or day, life or death, time or eternity, “It shall be well with the righteous.”
– Scott Richardson
IS GOD WILLING AND NOT ABLE?
I thoroughly detest that form of preaching which presents God in the Trinity of His Persons as being willing to save but unable to effect that which He wills. It is commonly heard in statements that begin with, “God wants to…” or “God has done all that He can do; now the rest is up to you.” Any such statement that puts a question mark of the power and ability of God to accomplish His will in salvation (or anything else) is dishonoring to God, contrary to the Scriptures and of no comfort to poor, needy sinners. It must be regarded as “another gospel!” The message of the gospel that honors God is true to Scriptures and brings joy and hope to a sinner is the soul cheering truth “He is able.” (Heb. 7:25).
Charles Pennington
Things of which man is able
The enemies of the free and sovereign grace of God claim that those of us, who believe and preach it, take away sinful man’s responsibility. We believe that he is totally unable apart from Divine Grace to do anything good in the sight of God that he is unable apart from being born again to do anything spiritual towards God. Though we believe and preach man’s spiritual and moral inability to save himself or commend himself to God there are some things we believe he is able by himself to do apart from being influenced by anything but his own wicked nature;
1. He is able by his own power to sin. He was conceived in sin, shapen in iniquity. (Ps .51:5)
2. He is able because of his nature to be in rebellion against the rule and commands of God Almighty. (Ex. 5:2)
3. He can hate God and righteousness as revealed in Christ; it is shown by his unwillingness to come to Christ for pardon and life.
4. He is able to perform “good works” (though unacceptable to God) as long as he can be recognized for them and get a pat on the back from his fellows.
5. He is able by his own ability to reject the testimony of God concerning his absolute sinfulness, God’s absolute Sovereignty, Christ as absolute Savior.
The scriptures say that man is DEAD in his sins. Dead men cannot give themselves life. Our message is this; “Sinner cast yourself at the feet of Christ saying; “if you WILL thou canst make me clean” for He alone can give life to a dead sinner. If men won’t come to Christ for life, why should they be angry with God for putting them in hell?
Don Bell
“For in that he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to support those who are tempted.” Hebrews 2:18
DO YOU THINK, my reader, was it no humiliation for the Son of God to be thus assailed by the prince of darkness? Was it no degradation, that His dignity should be questioned, His authority disputed, His reverence for and allegiance to, His Father assailed, and His very purity tampered with by a fallen and corrupt spirit whom He had ejected from heaven? Ah! how deeply and keenly He must have felt it to be so, the first moment He was brought in contact with this arch-fiend and subtle foe of God and man! But, oh, what glory beams from beneath this dark veil of Christ’s humiliation! How lovely and precious an object does He appear to saints and angels in this wondrous transaction! What holy sympathies and fond affections are kindled in the heart, and rise towards Him, as the eye surveys each particular—the appalling nature of the onset—the shock which His humanity sustained—the mighty power by which He was upheld—the signal victory which He achieved—the Divine consolation and comfort which flowed into His soul as His vanquished enemy retired from the conflict, leaving Him more than conqueror—and above all, the close and tender sympathy into which He was now brought with a tempted Church! These are features replete with thrilling interest and rich instruction, on which the renewed mind delights to dwell.
But our Lord’s humiliation went deeper still than this! The clouds now gathering around Him grew darker and more portentous as He advanced towards the final conflict. We must consider the first step of His bearing sin, the painful consciousness of which increased as the hour of its atonement drew on, as forming one of the most overwhelming demonstrations of that voluntary abasement to which He had stooped, and through which He was now passing. In the following passages this great truth of the Gospel is explicitly and emphatically stated. And let it be borne in mind, that when the Holy Spirit represents our Lord as bearing sin, the statement is not to receive a figurative, but a perfectly literal interpretation, as asserting a solemn and momentous fact. He bore not the appearance of sin, or the punishment merely of sin, but the sin itself.
Thus does the Holy Spirit declare it: “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities.” “The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” “He shall bear their iniquities.” “He bare the sin of many.” “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree.” “He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin.” There stood the eternal God, in the closest proximity to the evil one. Never did two extremes, so opposite to each other, meet in such near contiguity and collision. Essential sin, essential holiness; essential darkness, essential light; essential hatred, essential love; man’s deadliest foe, man’s dearest friend. What an hour of seeming power and triumph was this to the grand adversary of God and man! what an hour of deepening gloom and humiliation and defeat to God’s beloved Son! How would this Lucifer of the morning exult, as with the swellings of pride he placed his foot upon incarnate Deity! And how keenly and powerfully conscious would Jesus be, at that moment, of the deep abasement and degradation to which He had now sunk!
But behold how this great transaction contributed to the deep humiliation of the Son of God. What must have been the revulsion of moral feeling, what the shrinking of His holy soul, the first instant it came in personal contact with sin! What a mighty convulsion must have rocked His human nature, pure and sinless as it was! Saint of God! what composes your bitterest cup, and what constitutes your keenest, deepest sorrow? Has a tender Father blown upon your blessings, removed your mercies, lessened your comforts, darkened your bright landscape, dried up your sweet spring? Is this the cause of your shaded brow, your anxious look, your tearful eye, your troubled and disconsolate spirit? “Ah, no!” you perhaps exclaim; “rid me of this body of sin, and you chase the cloud from my brow, the tear from my eye, and the sorrow from my heart. It is the sin that dwells in me.” Do you think, then, what the spotless Lamb of God must have felt, and how deeply must it have entered into His humiliation—the existence of an all-absorbing, ever present, and ever painful and humiliating consciousness of bearing upon His holy soul iniquity, transgression, and sin!
Octavius Winslow.
TRANSCENDENTLY ABLE-John MacDuff
“Unto Him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think.” Ephesians 3:20
Could the Israelites at Elim fail to recall their immediately preceding wilderness experience? It was the depressing and discouraging one at Marah, where their longings and hopes were mocked with the bitter pool. But the God of the cloudy pillar made it the occasion of manifesting His wondrous power and boundless resources, showing that “with Him all things are possible.” A tree cast into the acrid waters transformed them into sweetness.
In all the difficulties, perplexities, and emergencies of the spiritual life, we may well rest with the consolatory question, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”—rejoicing in Him, who, as the true Healing Tree, changes—often reverses—the bitterest experiences. His hand is “never shortened that it cannot save.”
Wondrous and beautiful is the expression of the Great Apostle which heads this meditation—that verse with its grand repetition of words—its significant and touching repetition. See how the gradation rises. See how he mounts, as by a golden ladder, to his magnificent climax! Christ is “able to do,” Christ is “able to do abundantly,” Christ is “able to do abundantly above all that we ask or think.”—And then, as if he had not unburdened his soul of the full truth, the “goodly matter” his heart was composing, he adds another stone to the pyramid—”Exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.”
Let us rejoice in such a complete Savior as this, sufficient for all temporal and all spiritual necessities: who can bind up the broken body; who can bind up the broken soul; ease the aching head, and quiet the aching spirit; who can reclaim the wandering and save the lost. What earthly friend can help us so? Who else, but He, can fill with His presence and love the gap in the sorrow-stricken heart? But He can; He does! Lover and friend may be put far from us; what we once most cherished and doted on may be stricken with inevitable change; the roof where childhood reveled may be a heap of ruins, or inhabited by strangers; the parents’ arms that clasped us as we lisped our infant prayer, or which smoothed our pillows in sickness, may be decaying in the dust; voices that cheered us on the pilgrimage may be hushed in appalling silence.
But here is One who is Father, Brother, Physician, Friend, Home, ALL! His power intervenes and upholds where other resources fail or reveal their inadequacy. No storm can overturn that Home of unblighted love! No envious whisper can estrange that true Friend! No King of terrors can paralyze the Everlasting arms! “The Lord lives, and blessed be my Rock, and let the God of my salvation exalted.” Oh! blessed it is for the broken and downcast in the hour of crushing disappointment, or baffled plans, or defeated hope, or blighted affection: or, more than all, in that moment of greatest agony, when returning from the grave to the silent house of bereavement—entering the lessened fold, and marking the empty place in the flock—blessed it is to feel the Abiding Friend filling the empty place and the aching heart; challenging our trust and reliance in His ability thus to do for us “exceeding abundantly.” Life’s Elim-palms may be gone, but the Divine Pillar-cloud remains! “I will never leave you; I will (lit.) never, never, never forsake you.”
He gives too, not only above what we ask, but above what we think. Whatever our thoughts may be, His thoughts of love transcend them. Able to do for us, and willing to do for us, in a measure exceeding our highest conceptions. What a treasure-house of thoughts is every human bosom! What a strange history it would be (of hope, joy, fear, sadness, and brightness), were each heart unfolded! But it is, indeed, a precious assurance to every child of God, that for every thought of his (be they anxious, disquieting, misgiving), there is a counterpart comfort. For the multitude of thoughts there is a corresponding multitude of consolations! “Many, O Lord my God, are Your thoughts which are toward us. The things You planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare.” No, truly, God’s comforting thoughts outweigh and outbalance all our experiences of sadness and sorrow. “For a small moment I have forsaken you, but with great mercies will I gather you. In a little wrath I hid My face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on you!”
“Great our need, but greater far
Is our Father’s loving power;
He upholds each mighty star,
He unfolds each tiny flower.
Ask not how, but trust Him still;
Ask not when, but wait His will;
Simply on His word rely,
God shall all your need supply.
“Can we count redemption’s treasure,
Scan the glory of God’s love?
Such shall be the boundless measure
Of His blessing from above.
All we ask, or think, and more,
He will give in bounteous store;
No good thing will He deny,
God shall all your need supply.”
“Be at rest once more, O my soul, for the Lord has been good to you.”